Rich Fiscus
29 Nov 2007 20:55
Consumer rights activixts at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) have released a report detailing evidence they've amassed against Comcast over the cable provider's "network management," which apparently manages BitTorrent connections right off their network.
According to the EFF report, Comcast's network management software isn't just prioritizing traffic. It's actually spoofing network traffic in order to fool BitTorrent clients that there's something fishy about the connection - which of course there is. It just appears to be something Comcast is intentionally doing, rather than network issues that would cause the clients to legitemately close connections.
Despite Comcast's claims to the EFF that they don't target any specific application, the type of traffic being reported would be exactly that - targeted attacks on connections for specific programs. Although they couldn't confirm with 100% certainty that the forged RST (reset connection) packets are coming from Comcast's equipment, it can be confirmed that the mysterious connection resets only occur when one or more of the ends of a BitTorrent connection is through a Comcast connection.
You can find the entire EFF report in PDF format on their website.